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Archive for the 'Publishers' Category

The Baby and the Bath Water

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

The University of Pittsburgh Press has just made an extraordinary announcement. The Press plans to make its entire backlist available for free online two years after formal, print publication. Here is what the AAUP newsletter has to say about this:
Recently, the University of Pittsburgh Press has announced that it is working to [...]

Creative Commons Gets Creative

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

Creative Commons has announced a long-awaited (at least by me) addendum to its licenses. From the CC Web site:
CC+ is a protocol providing a simple way for users to get rights beyond the rights granted by a CC license. For example, a work’s Creative Commons license might offer noncommercial rights. With CC+, the license [...]

eBook Subscriptions and Page Views

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Joe Wikert of Publishing 2020 talks about the potential for having subscription-based ebook vending models, with page-view based economics.
“Could you imagine a model where you pay $X/month for access to an unlimited number of books? It’s never going to happen in the print world but I think this could be the killer app for [...]

Cory Doctorow Meets the Giant Behemoth

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Cory Doctorow has some interesting things to say about the Amazon Kindle in The Guardian. Doctorow doesn’t like it much, as it doesn’t conform to his view of the Internet, which includes the ability to move files around without restriction.
What Doctorow doesn’t say, however, is that if the Kindle [...]

I’ve watched a number of revolutions in scholarly publishing…

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

… over the last couple of decades. Technical revolutions, societal revolutions, cultural revolutions. I gave a long talk at UIUC recently where I told the story of one of them, as context and contrast with current revolutions. The story itself is worth telling in this forum. It’s long, so sit back.

I want to first [...]